Oliver Bearman has criticised the penalty imposed on him for the collision with Pierre Gasly: he believes the sanction is far too harsh, if any penalty should be given at all
Oliver Bearman says he is “quite shocked” by the ten-second penalty he received for his collision with Pierre Gasly at the United States Grand Prix. The Haas driver does not believe he is solely to blame and considers the severity of the penalty disproportionate.
Moreover, the contact cost him more than just time: damage to the underbody impaired his car’s performance so severely that he was forced to retire from the race on lap 24.
Bearman had made up two places on the first lap and attacked Gasly on the inside at Turn 13 on the following lap. As the gap closed, he drove two wheels onto the yellow kerb to avoid contact. Nevertheless, his left-front tyre made contact with the Alpine’s sidepod. Both cars sustained significant damage as a result.
“To be honest, I was quite shocked,” says Bearman. “If anything, that was a racing incident.” Particularly in light of other decisions this season, he cannot understand the severity of the penalty. “Ten seconds for this sort of incident seems to me, given what happened, completely excessive.”
Bearman: “I couldn’t just vanish into thin air”
The Briton argues that he was far enough away from Gasly to have a right to the position. Instead, he was left with hardly any room. “I was perhaps given half a car’s width. I drove onto the kerb to avoid contact, but it simply wasn’t possible.”
Bearman emphasises that he neither locked up his wheels nor lost control. Once he had started the overtaking manoeuvre, he could not simply vanish into thin air. From his point of view, the contact was therefore a racing incident and not a situation that warranted a ten-second penalty.
The consequences for the Haas driver were severe in any case. The contact caused part of the underbody to come loose, and its condition deteriorated progressively over the following laps. At first, the car still felt competitive, but then it lost more and more performance.
“For perhaps five laps, I felt that it was handling very well and everything was fine, but then the car got worse bit by bit – and after that, the race was basically over,” explains Bearman.
Eight tenths lost: Haas forced to retire
On lap eleven, Bearman let his team-mate Esteban Ocon pass. The gap to Gasly ahead of him and Ocon behind him had previously been stable, but then the Haas’s performance deteriorated abruptly. In the first sector, Bearman lost around eight-tenths of a second from one lap to the next compared to his own best time. It was then clear to him that the damage had become significantly worse.
“That’s when I simply said: ‘I’m not going to continue in this race; I’ll let Esteban past.’ He was closing in anyway, and I just didn’t want to hold him up,” says Bearman. Haas is battling Audi in the Constructors’ Championship, which is why he didn’t want to hinder his team-mate unnecessarily.
On lap 24, it was finally over. The car had become increasingly unpredictable and the damage had become dangerous. “It was getting worse and worse; it was getting dangerous,” reports Bearman. As well as the condition of the car, the strain on the engine and other components had also played a part.
Gasly also loses downforce
Despite the damage, Gasly finished tenth, securing a point for Alpine. However, the Frenchman was only partially satisfied with how things had gone. As a result of the contact with Bearman, his car also lost a significant portion of its underbody.
“It was a minor touch, but it simply tore off quite a large piece from the right-hand side of our underbody – at the front and in the middle section,” explains Gasly. He estimates that this cost him almost ten points of downforce.
At the finish, Gasly was eight seconds behind Liam Lawson. Whether he could have challenged the Racing Bulls without the damage remains to be seen. “I’m satisfied, considering we finished tenth. It’s just that I would have liked to know what might have been possible against Liam without that damage. We’ll never know.”